TV Commercials

Most of the people hate to watch commercials in between their favorite programs but I somehow like it. People may say it’s strange but I would any day prefer watching those commercials rather than watching crap Indian soaps on T.V. Lot of creativity goes into directing a commercial. The entire info about the product should come across to the viewer within 30 seconds or so. Ad maker should see to it that the entire information of the product is put into it and it should be as short as possible. If they try to put in more information, it becomes lengthy and boring, and if they try to make it short they lose out on some information about the product. It definitely is a very tough job to balance both. With addition to it the ad has to be creative, so that it stays in the mind of the viewer for a long time.

According to me commercials can be classified into 3 categories
1.The one that is very interesting, creative and makes lot of sense and we feel like watching it over and over again.
2. Boring and which makes no sense whatsoever.
3. The normal one(straight forward), i.e. straight to the point
I feel the first two types are more effective compared to the third. If it’s interesting then we obviously talk about it and the product gets good publicity and even if the commercial doesn’t make sense we keep wondering what it was really about and we talk about the product which will help their cause. It does not mean that there will be very good sales for a particular product only if the commercial is very good. It really doesn’t work that way. Even if it’s bad it will sometimes work. Basically the commercial and the product should make an impact on the viewer so that it stays in the mind and generate sales.

I got an opportunity to attend a two day course in office last month. It was basically about Personality development and Team building. There was an activity which we were supposed to do, which was quite interesting. Each team consisted of two participants. They had given us a sheet of paper and we were supposed to manufacture a product out of it and market it to the rest of the participants. Everyone came up with their own interesting ideas and we were all ready with our products in no time but no one really knew how to market it effectively. It really is a tough job. The first team presented their product, they were straight forward in their approach and they immediately got into the technical details about their product and about advantages of buying it. There was no creativity whatsoever in their marketing style. People could find out easily the limitations of it and started questioning about it and they could not justify their claims in the end. Another team came with a simple idea, put lots of masala into it, they did not get much into the finer technical details about the product and they made it look funny and very interesting. None of us could find out the negative things about the product as we were all thinking about the way they presented it. No one really cared to know the limitations of that product. Even though the first team had a good product in hand compared to this team they failed because of lack of creativity and keeping it just simple. Any product will definitely have both advantages as well as its limitations. It depends on how well the product is put in front of the consumer. So the normal straight forward ads don’t really work.

There are a few companies from which we can expect really good commercials every single time. Some of my all time favorites are ads from Sprite, Fevikwik, Fevicol, Mentos and now the latest from Virgin is good, the one where a guy flirts with a girl in the train where virgin mobile helps him keep the mother away while he flirts with her daughter. I feel the talented ad makers should get into directing movies because they are the ones who know the value of each second unlike our movie directors.